


These Foolish Things (Remind Me Of You)

by LaBelleIzzy



Category: Agent Carter (TV), Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Adopted Sibling Relationship, BAMF Peggy Carter, Bittersweet, Canon Compliant, Canonical Character Death, Developing Friendships, Ensemble Cast, Friendship, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Hijinks & Shenanigans, Hurt/Comfort, It Gets Worse Before It Gets Better, Male-Female Friendship, Peggy Carter & Howard Stark Friendship, SHIELD, Sarcasm, Whump
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-12-22
Updated: 2020-01-22
Packaged: 2021-02-26 03:00:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,791
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21866377
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LaBelleIzzy/pseuds/LaBelleIzzy
Summary: Peggy started with admiration for Howard's genius. Howard started with admiration for Peggy's legs. ...They wound up somewhere totally different.Vignettes, scenes, snippets, turning points, arguments, tiffs, and (occasionally) agreements as Peggy and Howard's friendship develops over the decades. Starts with the canonical whump.
Relationships: Howling Commandos & Howard Stark, Peggy Carter & Howard Stark, Peggy Carter & Howling Commandos, Peggy Carter/Steve Rogers
Comments: 1
Kudos: 16
Collections: Fandom Trumps Hate 2019





	1. Downtime

**Author's Note:**

  * For [chelseagirl](https://archiveofourown.org/users/chelseagirl/gifts).



During the war, Peggy and Howard occasionally found themselves back at the base camp at the same time in between missions. Sometimes they were too tired to do more than share a pot of tea. 

Sometimes Howard spiked the pot of tea and Peggy welcomed it.

Exhaustion was the everyday reality. Soldiers, staffers, and researchers would find time to kip down as often as possible, but there was never enough sleep and more importantly, never enough rest. There was always far too much work to do to get done in any given twenty four hour period, and too few people to get the work done. 

Wartime was the worst of frantic busyness interleaved with occasional hours-long bouts of interminable waiting. It was toohe worst combination of frantic worry and utter boredom that keeps everyone simultaneously too tightly wound and with not enough to do.

At moments like that, Howard and Peggy started playing poker. Stakes were cigarettes or blocks of chocolate, occasionally creative IOUs that were not allowed to be about sexual favors, EVER, no not ever, Howard. 

Sometimes the IOUs were for things you looked forward to getting after the war was over, and things returned to normal. For whatever value of normal you figured there would be after the war, of course.

When the Howlies were in camp, Dum-dum and Dernier and Gabe would join the game. Morita and Steve or Falsworth joined occasionally, but usually would watch and kibitz. This game was invitation-only, because only a few people could be trusted to not tell ridiculous lies (or ridiculous truths) about Captain America to the papers.

Bucky liked to play when Howard and Dum-dum were at the table. The three of them flung insults like darts and laughed uproariously when one struck home. Their bets always fell into three categories. One: Tricking one of the others into doing something mechanical, like fixing up or borrowing favorite weapons. Two: A well crafted, non deadly prank on someone in camp who deserved it… or three, a design for something new and deadly as a surprise for the enemy out in the field. Dum-dum and Howard called those, "toys". You owe me a new toy, Stark. How do you like your new toy, Barnes? 

Morita and Howard would talk about modern technology and spin yarns about what future tech was going to look like. Jim had been on track to re enroll at UCLA for his bachelor of science when his family was sent to the internment camps, but he would never talk about it. Only about the now and the future. 

Falsworth (who played only occasionally) bet Peggy one time, that he’d take her out for a proper high tea at one of the London fancy hotels. Pity England’d have to rebuild after the bombings, but still. He lost that hand, Peggy thought, intentionally. Hope takes various forms... 

Gabe and Dernier were making plans to travel together in France once the Allies win the war. Based on Josephine Baker's success, Gabe already knew the French would be far more welcoming to American GI’s who happened to be black than his Georgia hometown would ever be. They bet on who'd have to buy the first drinks when they got to Paris, who'd have to buy the train tickets, and other silliness. Neither Peggy nor Howard were deeply fluent speakers so they needed Gabe to translate, but Gabe told outrageous stories with the straightest of faces, then caught Dernier's eye and they'd both bust out laughing.

Dum-dum wins an IOU from Howard to let him stay at Howard’s place in Hollywood for two weeks after the war. Howard sweetens the pot by promising lots of lovely feminine eye candy and a bottomless pitcher of margaritas. Margaritas with the good tequila. When Dum-dum won the bet, he referred to it as margaritas with señoritas, waggling his eyebrows. Bucky couldn't stop laughing.

Despite that particular hand that he lost to Dugan, Peggy had to admit Howard had a surprisingly good poker face...

Peggy’s was better though. She had a tidy little stack of IOUs and a shelf in her barracks with small tokens of her various wins. Her favorite is the small foil crane Jim folded out of the chocolate wrapper she won off Bucky that one time. Bucky had mock glared but offered up "her spoils of war" like a gentleman. 

Peggy and Steve didn't play poker against each other. She thought it was intentional on his part. They did eat meals together and talk. It was shy and a little bit awkward, but they did make each other laugh, and she looked forward to seeing him as often as she could.

Howard and Steve had a surprisingly gentle relationship at the poker table. Howard would make fun of Steve's art school background, but Steve was always able to talk about the failure of the flying car back at the Stark expo in New York. He never let Howard live that down, making the story bigger and sillier each time that he teased Howard.

Poker table was where everybody could let their hair down, and relax a little bit. Maybe get a little drunk, and forget for a couple of hours, about the war and the next missions that somebody was getting sent out on. 

But then it got on to being winter. Everybody was miserable: cold, wet, tired, and hungry. And then Steve and Bucky and the Howlies were assigned the mission into the Alps, to try and take out Zola's train.

Bucky fell. 

At Home Office, the mission was logged as a success.

The poker table stayed empty. There was no comfort for any of them.

Two weeks later, a grim faced Steve kissed Peggy for the first (last!) time before he leaped aboard the Valkyrie.

And Peggy cried on the other end of the radio, with static all that was left of that one fragile hope.


	2. Grief

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Peggy gets the job done, no matter how she feels.

Army bases are the worst for gossip. 

Especially if there's anything going on involving one of the officers. Especially if one of the officers is a big shot the way that Captain America was. 

Everybody on base knew somebody who was in the room when Captain America took his airplane down into the ice. Everybody on base knew who was on the other end of that radio with him. 

Most were gentle and respectful and if there was pity in their eyes, Peggy trained herself not to notice it, filtered it out. 

Howard was different that way. He didn't show pity, wasn't gentle. But then he almost never was. Instead he brought something by her barracks every so often, dropping it casually, with some off-handed remark. Chocolate. A lipstick that one could almost never get, what with rationing, and in her favorite shade. Oranges when he could find them. It was a kind of rough sympathy that worked, at least a little. At least sometimes.

Peggy was doing everything she could stay busy: if she wasn't useful what good was she? 

When Peggy was alone she felt like she was dissolving into nothing, like she already was nothing. Feeling like nothing was preferable to giving in and feeling the roaring grief and fury churning beneath the surface of her steely resolve. But "nothing"? Being nothing achieved nothing. 

Nothing? Was unacceptable.

Internally, she felt like she was clawing out from under black sludge, or trying to swim to the surface from the bottom of a lightless, icy sea. The horror of it.

(Oh, Steve.) 

She only wept when she was alone in her bed, and the weight too heavy to ignore.

But it wasn't as though she only sat in her tent and cried. She went out. Every single day, she went out. She pushed past the numbness to join Colonel Phillips in reviewing the overnight reports from the front every morning. She wrote analyses, worked with other strategists, trained the new recruits.

But she would make tea, and eat biscuits that Falsworth left her. Read Gabe Jones's translations of French Resistance correspondence, discuss them with Colonel Phillips. Jim Morita came by once or twice, pleased to tell her about some recent radio technology breakthrough he and Howard were working on. Very occasionally she got permission to go on reconnaissance with the boys. 

The platoon was taking care of her, and she did what she could to return that care.

She sat with the Howlies in the canteen for lunch or supper every day except days she couldn't bear it. 

Sometimes anything that wasn't the immediate mission was unbearable, like a stone around her neck, or a knife in her belly. 

Those days were the days she requested that Colonel Phillips send her on messenger duty. He'd read her request, glance up at her with narrowed eyes, raise an eyebrow, nod, and hand her the sheaf of paperwork.

Phillips had never expressed condolences. Peggy thought she'd crack down the center if he ever did anything so out of character as express human sympathy. Not if he did it in her direction. Not now.

Messenger jobs meant days of travel away from camp. More than once, Howard agreed to fly her to the nearest large airbase to get her safely started on her journey. When he couldn't, Dugan drove with her. 

Dugan was almost as good at being distracting and ridiculous as Howard was. Luckily, he was also much better at staying silent when Peggy asked him to. 

Silence in company was the most bearable.

Of course, every day of fighting the war was dreadful. The deep aching sense of loss permeated every single day, as did blood and fear and worry. Bravado and gallows humor kept everyone going.

When she could bear to think of him, (Steve.) she could convert her fury and the other, darker emotions, into work. She could fuel the thinking, planning, writing and strategy with this force inside her, the need to make this loss bearable. To make losing Steve, and all the other men, worth it.

Peggy leveraged their pity and her loss… everyone's loss, for motivation. Every day she burned the rocket fuel driving out from her heart. Focusing on the fight they were in, put her in the best place to keep everyone working furiously on defeating Hydra and the Axis Powers. 

They all had suffered a loss that day the Valkyrie crashed, and they were all grimly limping onward, muscling forward against the enemy by sheer resolve and willpower. 

And they would win.

And they did win.

And then? Life eventually started to move on.

The war ended, however there so much work remained to be done. So much pain, so much grief, still. But battles were to be fought and won in a more civilian life, now.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Writer's block is the worst. 
> 
> I need to call this chapter good in order to move on... Unbetaed, so y'all are welcome to point out typos and verb agreement mistakes.
> 
> I promise that Howard will actually have part of the story in the rest of the chapters. Cross my heart.

**Author's Note:**

> Nat King Cole singing the Title Song:  
> https: //youtu.be/biNNbvnxCM8
> 
> This is shaping up to be more bittersweet than I originally intended it to be, but sometimes you have to tell the story that it is, and not the one you thought it would be. 
> 
> It's been a slow going process but the story is ... The only word I can use is "accreting".
> 
> Help the author one of two ways:
> 
> 1) this is unbetaed and I know I missed a typo, please let me know if you find it?
> 
> 2) I'm Looking for song recs from the early to mid '50's that give you nostalgic Feels or that you're fond of. I have some, welcome other suggestions. 
> 
> I promised 5k words to Chelseagirl. This may wind up more than that, because I keep coming up with more images and scenes and snippets of story as I write. Fic brain is a wonderful thing!
> 
> Thanks for your comments and kudos, I treasure every one.


End file.
